Thursday, October 28, 2010

I wasn't blogging back when Harpo turned one, but I did scrounge around on my computer and find pictures from his first birthday!!!

I found this hat:

That came with numbers 1-5 :-) it was an exciting moment. (Harpo's excited too can't you tell!)

My mom was visiting us this year and it was when we lived in the apartment. I just realized although Harpo has lived in 3 states, he has only celebrated birthdays here in Minnesota.

This is the year the new collar tradition began.

He got a reflective collar this year. Surprisingly the reflective coating didn't last the entire year.... this is also when we walked him more. Aww poor Harpo. We got a house and he doesn't get walked as much. Kyle and I are thankful that we don't have to go outside 3-4 times a day in all kinds of weather. But I think Harpo loves having a house, so it evens out.

We celebrated Harpo's birthday this week, he turned 4 years old on Tuesday, October 26th! (that's 29 in dog years! The formula is: 10.5 dog years per human year for the first 2 years, then 4 dog years per human year for each year after.) I can't believe we've had this little furball for almost 4 years (we got him mid-December the year he was born).

Every year we celebrate by getting him a new collar and doing something special. It was the windiest day EVER on Tuesday so going to a park was pretty much out of the question. We had winds up to 50 mph! Many trees in our neighborhood blown over and lots of wind damage all over the twin cities. SOOO since we couldn't go outside, we decided to take Harpo on a car ride (which he loves!) to Petsmart! He was very excited!

We bought him his new collar and some liver treats. In years past I was ambitious enough to bake him doggie treats, but this year I just didn't make the time.

We put on his new doggie collar

Kyle picked this years collar out. He likes the plain, masculine colored one... where as I prefer the printed, cute ones. (I'll get to pick next year) This year it's black leather with little imprints on it, which you can't really tell. I am having to get used to is as it kinda looks like a shock collar, lol. Very grown up for him :-)

And of course we took some pictures of him in his birthday hat!!!

Although I only have numbers up to 5, so after next year I'm going to have to make the numbers, lol.

Second Birthday - OH NO! I realized all my photos from when I was first blogging are GONE! :-( how sad... I now use flickr to host my blog photos, Boo Hoo.... okay I edited that one post and put harpo's birthday pics up.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

While my mom was here, we spent Saturday heading up to beautiful Duluth for a quick day trip. The day before, Friday, we broke a weather record, the high was 87. (our normal average for that day of the year is 62) Last year when Matt was visiting this time of year it SNOWED! Anyway so it was a beautiful weekend, and we wanted to enjoy it. Mom had never been to Duluth; Kyle and I just knew she'd love it.

We had breakfast that morning at our favorite roof-top diner: Uptown Cafeteria. Then headed up north with Harpo in tow. Our first stop was a little rest area. I walked Harpo along the designated dog area and captured his fall portraits at the same time :-)

He's such a good boy. He's used to his mom taking so many pictures of him, he does well when I say "sit and smile", lol.

Once we got to Duluth, the temperature had changed drastically. It was rather windy and chilly up by the lake.

We had a nice time walking around and enjoying the water crashing against the rocks.

Harpo loved being out and about too!

We got to watch a small sailboat go under the bridge. Then while we were eating we could barely see two large boats going through the canal.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

So with mom being in town, it means LOTS of sight seeing. It's fun to take our visitors around to see what we see any time we want. A week or so ago I got a Groupon for Nye's. Nye's is a Polonaise restaurant, which in fact - Kyle and I went to a while ago, back when we first moved here. Nye's is on the top 10 list of places to visit in the Twin Cities. We hadn't eaten there before though.

After stuffing ourselves with polish food, we walked down by my mom's favorite place, the stone arch bridge and St. Anthony falls.

It was a beautiful evening. While mom sat and listened to the gushing river, I had fun taking pictures. It's what I like to do :-)

This is the 3rd Ave Bridge

Here is a peak at the Hennepin Ave bridge looking at it under the 3rd Avenue Bridge.

After listening to the gushing St. Anthony Falls, we walked over onto the Stone Arch Bridge. There were many others out enjoying the evening.

My mom is in town this weekend. Thursday we went out to the little town of Stillwater to see the river town and also take a lunch boat ride on the St. Croix River. There were a LOT of old people on this boat. Honestly I didn't think there would be enough people to ride on a Thursday afternoon, but to my surprise there were a lot. I think a local nursing home was taking a field trip :-P

We made it to Stillwater just in time to buy our ticket and board the boat at 11:30.

As we embarked on our river journey we saw the town of Stillwater and noticed the water was very high.

We enjoyed the pretty scenery.

It was a gorgeous fall day.

We saw seagulls and sailboats.

And I had fun taking pictures all over the boat.

Mom loved it, she loves the river

After going south on the river for about an hour we turned around and headed back to the town

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

This past weekend was the TC Marathon and other running events. Kyle and I ran in the 10K race on Saturday - I wrote about the technical parts here. There was also a 5K on Saturday, in addition to a lot of family events. Sunday was the big race and started with the 10 mile run 'the short cut to the Capitol' followed by the full 26.2 marathon.

All the races ended at the state capitol in St. Paul. The 5K & 10K both started and ended there, then the 10 mile and the marathon both started at the metrodome in Minneapolis and ended here.

The Twin Cities Marathon is called the most beautiful urban marathon in America!!! Almost gives you motivation to want to run it, doesn't it? Here is the map of the marathon course: (on the far left you can see the lakes, that middle lake - Lake Calhoun is my normal running lake. A few weeks ago Kyle and I did Calhoun & Isles to prepare for our 10K.

This is why they call the 10 mile the 'short cut to the Capitol':

And here are the 5K and 10K course maps:

We had a friend running the 10 mile, which started at 7:00. We knew he was in the second huddle starting at 7:10 or so so we figured he'd finish around 8:15... so we took our time getting up and heading over to St. Paul. Well it turns out he was farther ahead than we had thought. I dropped Kyle off to run up to the side line, while I frantically looked for parking. I was hoping to find free parking, but desperate times call for desperate measures and there just wasn't enough time, so I found parking ($10 yikes) and RAN up a super steep hill to make it to the side lines in time. Luckily he hadn't passed yet. As I'm on the phone with Kyle and Enoch's wife, Michelle, trying to figure out where he was. Luckily Michelle was getting text updates as to where Enoch was at times, this helped somewhat. Kyle was a little further ahead and I was about .2 from the finish line. Looking, camera in hand, hoping to see him before he passed. Then there he was! I screamed "ENOCH" and he turned his head... silly me didn't have my camera on then I frantically got it up to my eye to shoot a picture.

Yeah not the best... but at least I captured the moment, lol. I figured Kyle would be heading my way because he would have seen him before I did. I stood there for a bit and called Kyle, "did you see him" Kyle: "no, I'm still looking he hasn't gone by yet." me: "i just saw him, he's already finished" this was crushing to Kyle, but at least one of us got to hollar at him to cheer him to the finish. After the race we meet up with Michelle and Enoch at the end. Then we decided to head over into Minneapolis to watch the marathon. They had some friends in it and one of our church's lead pastors was also running in the race. We ended up going to around mile 17 and stood to cheer everyone on. Some people had their names on their shirts which made it easy for us to cheer them on, pretty fun.

Then we spotted Steve (our lead pastor at church)! I was on the other side of the trail, out of the sun, so I actually spotted him first. I am not sure how I recognized him, searching for someone in a race is like looking for waldo on a moving filmstrip... rather straining for the eyes. But we saw him and hollared!!!

It was a pretty fun weekend and full of many healthy hearts!!! Here are the stats from the races:5K total finishing runners: 1734 (666 men, 1068 women) - Avg. Time 39.03First Male: 15:26 First Female: 19:38

Friday, October 1, 2010

I got up early this morning and headed over to my good ol' shootin' spot. Lake Calhoun & Lake Harriet.

My goal was to capture the fall color on the trees as the morning sun glistened on them. Luckily I also captured a cloudy sunrise (something on my 'to do list'). I don't really have much dialog to go with these so I'll just post them for some viewing enjoyment :-)

(and a friendly reminder, please do not use my photos without permission, thanks!)

Before the sun popped up over the horizon line:

After the sun popped up over the trees:

That last one there is back on Calhoun, that's my favorite willow tree! You might remember it from some of my other sunrise photos :-)

All images are copyright of Daisy Simpson. It is unlawful and illegal to copy, scan, alter or edit the images in any way. This depreciates the photos value as well as my reputation, I take great care in capturing and editing each image and they are each important to me. Thank you for respecting my passion and my copyright.